Very happy to show off a little side project I've been kicking around this spring. PolitiCall's an iOS app dedicated to helping you make your voice heard in Washington by putting the contact information for your members of Congress available any time, anywhere.

You gotta give Facebook credit for trying new things in what seems like a quiet space. Last week, started getting these chat-like modal alerts for likes and comments on a post.

You still get badges in the top right, just like other notifications. But now also this. It seems both excessive and also weird that it's so very close to the chat experience, which in itself, weirdly, still isn't all-in on Messenger.

When it comes to “the empty spaces” most people don’t want to do work, but work is exactly what Twitter required. You had to know what you were interested in, know who to follow based on those interests, and then, to top it all off, you had to pick out the parts that you were interested in from a stream of unfiltered tweets; Facebook, in contrast, did the work for you.

Thompson's analysis of where Facebook overcame Twitter is fantastic, but I found this quote to be incredibly compelling. In essence, this is what I love about Twitter far more than Facebook. I wouldn't say that I've tuned my Twitter experience to be solely things I'm interested in, but it's something that I definitely miss when I find myself staring at my timeline.

I hesitate to lump myself in as what Thompson refers to as an "early adopter of Facebook"—it was something you joined when you went to college—but his argument about the news feed's shifts are true. I still hate "Top Stories" and the "here's another piece of clickbait that eight high school classmates like."

$1.1 billion dollars in the two-week period ending January 3rd, smashing their own record twice in the space of just over a week.

There's no breakdown here of what's in-app purchase versus app purchase, nor is there a breakdown by category, but it just underlines the reports that iOS devices were approximately 50% of device activations on Christmas.

In 2015 overall app usage grew by 58%. In this context, we define app usage as a user opening an app and recording what we call a “session.” With the exception of Games, every app category posted year-over-year growth with Personalization, News & Magazines and Productivity leading the way with triple-digit growth.

What was even more impressive is the majority of that growth rate came from existing users versus new users. In fact, in 2015, we estimate that 40% of the 58% total growth in sessions came from existing users, compared to 20% in 2014 and 10% in 2013. This jives well with the report we released last summer, showing a fast increase in mobile addicts.

Some interesting figures here from Flurry.

I'm dubious of this Personalization category they've created. To me, apps that "range from Android lock-screens to Emoji keyboards" seem a little too broad. There's no doubting what Khalaf posits here that the growth coming out of "Emoji apps" is a result of a user desire for customization, but what's the longevity of the category, really?